First sustained flight of the Wright Flyer
==========================================

The Wright Flyer (often retrospectively referred to as Flyer I, 1903 Flyer and occasionally 
Kitty Hawk) was the first powered aircraft designed and built by the Wright brothers. The 
flight of the Wright Flyer is recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, 
the standard setting and record-keeping body for aeronautics and astronautics, as "the 
first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight".


Design and construction

The Flyer was based on the Wrights' experience testing gliders at Kitty Hawk between 1900 
and 1902. Their last glider, the 1902 Glider, led directly to the design of the Flyer.

The Wrights built the aircraft in 1903 using 'giant spruce' wood as their construction 
material. The wings were designed with a 1-in-20 camber. Since they could not find a 
suitable automobile engine for the task, they commissioned their employee Charlie Taylor 
to build a new design from scratch. A sprocket chain drive, borrowing from bicycle 
technology, powered the twin propellers, which were also made by hand.

The Flyer was a canard biplane configuration. As with the gliders, the pilot flew lying 
on his stomach on the lower wing with his head toward the front of the craft in an effort 
to reduce drag. He steered by moving a cradle attached to his hips. The cradle pulled 
wires which warped the wings and turned the rudder simultaneously.

The Flyer's "runway" was a track of 2x4s stood on their narrow edge, which the brothers 
nicknamed the "Junction Railroad."

Upon returning to Kitty Hawk in 1903, the Wrights completed assembly of the Flyer while 
practicing on the 1902 Glider from the previous season. On December 14, 1903, they felt 
ready for their first attempt at powered flight. With the help of men from the nearby 
government life-saving station, the Wrights moved the Flyer and its launching rail to the 
incline of a nearby sand dune, Big Kill Devil Hill, intending to make a gravity-assisted 
takeoff. The brothers tossed a coin to decide who would get the first chance at piloting 
and Wilbur won. The airplane left the rail, but Wilbur pulled up too sharply, stalled, 
and came down in about three seconds with minor damage.

Repairs after the abortive first flight took three days. When they were ready again on 
December 17, the wind was averaging more than 20 mph, so the brothers laid the launching 
rail on level ground, pointed into the wind, near their camp. This time the wind, instead 
of an inclined launch, helped provide the necessary airspeed for takeoff. Because Wilbur 
already had the first chance, Orville took his turn at the controls. His first flight 
lasted 12 seconds for a total distance of 120 feet (36.5 m) -- shorter than the wingspan 
of a Boeing 747.

Taking turns, the Wrights made four brief, low-altitude flights that day. The flight paths 
were all essentially straight; turns were not attempted. Each flight ended in a bumpy and 
unintended "landing". The last flight, by Wilbur, was 852 feet (260 m) in 59 seconds, much 
longer than each of the three previous flights of 120, 175 and 200 feet. The landing broke 
the front elevator supports, which the Wrights hoped to repair for a possible four-mile 
(6 km) flight to Kitty Hawk village. Soon after, a heavy gust picked up the Flyer and 
tumbled it end over end, damaging it beyond any hope of quick repair. It was never flown 
again.

In 1904, the Wrights continued refining their designs and piloting techniques in order to 
obtain fully controlled flight. Major progress toward this goal was achieved with a new 
Flyer in 1904 and even more decisively in 1905 with a third Flyer, in which Wilbur made a 
39-minute, 24-mile (39 km) nonstop circling flight on October 5. While the 1903 Flyer was 
clearly a historically important test vehicle, its hallowed status in the American 
imagination has obscured the role of its two successors in the continuing development that 
led to the Wrights' mastery of controlled powered flight in 1905.


The influence of the Flyer

The Flyer series of aircraft were the first to achieve controlled heavier-than-air flight, 
but some of the mechanical techniques the Wrights used to accomplish this were not 
influential for the development of aviation as a whole, although their theoretical 
achievements were. The Flyer design depended on wing-warping and a forward horizontal 
stabilizer, features which would not scale and produced a hard-to-control aircraft. However, 
the Wrights' pioneering use of "roll control" by twisting the wings to change wingtip angle 
in relation to the airstream led directly to the more practical use of ailerons by their 
imitators, such as Curtiss and Farman. The Wrights' original concept of simultaneous 
coordinated roll and yaw control (rear rudder deflection), which they discovered in 1902, 
perfected in 1903-1905, and patented in 1906, represents the solution to controlled flight 
and is used today on virtually every fixed-wing aircraft. The Wright patent included the 
use of hinged rather than warped surfaces for the forward elevator and rear rudder. Other 
features that made the Flyer a success were highly efficient wings and propellers, which 
resulted from the Wrights' exacting wind tunnel tests and made the most of the marginal 
power delivered by their early "homebuilt" engines; slow flying speeds (and hence survivable 
accidents); and an incremental test/development approach. The future of aircraft design, 
however, lay with rigid wings, ailerons and rear control surfaces.

After a single statement to the press in January 1904 and a failed public demonstration in 
May, the Wright Brothers did not publicize their efforts, and other aviators who were 
working on the problem of flight (notably Santos Dumont) were thought by the press to have 
preceded them by many years. Indeed, several short heavier-than-air powered flights had 
been made by other aviators before 1903, leading to controversy about precedence (see 
first flying machine). The Wrights, however, claimed to be the first of these which was 
'properly controlled'.

The issue of control was correctly seen as critical by the Wrights, and they acquired a 
wide American patent intended to give them ownership of basic aerodynamic control. This was 
fought in both American and European courts. European designers, however, were little 
affected by the litigation and continued their own development. The legal fight in the U.S., 
however, had a crushing effect on the nascent American aircraft industry, and by the time 
of World War I, the U.S. had no suitable military aircraft and had to purchase French and 
British models.


The Flyer after Kitty Hawk

The Wright Brothers returned home to Dayton for Christmas after the flights of the Flyer. 
While they had abandoned their other gliders, they realized the historical significance of 
the Flyer. They crated it and shipped it back to Dayton, where it stayed in storage for 9 
years. It was inundated in the Great Dayton Flood in March 1913.

In 1910 the Wrights first made attempts to exhibit the Flyer in the Smithsonian Institution 
but talks fell through with the ensuing lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and the Flyer may have 
been needed as repeated evidence in court cases. In 1916 as the patent fights were ending, 
Orville brought the Flyer out of storage and prepared it for display at the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology. (Wilbur had died in 1912.) He replaced parts of the wing covering, 
the props, and the engine's crankcase, crankshaft, and flywheel. The crankcase, crankshaft 
and flywheel of the original engine had been sent to the Aero Club of America in New York 
for an exhibit in 1906 and were never returned to the Wrights. The replacement crankcase, 
crankshaft and flywheel came from the guinea pig engine Charlie Taylor had built in 1904 
and used for testing in the bicycle shop.